Wednesday, February 12, 2014

China Telecom has conducted the first commercial tests of Embedded OTDR (eOTDR) technology in its live fiber access network in Xinjiang province.

An optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR), uses scattered and reflected light to measure transmission quality along optical fibers, and is primarily used for fiber testing and troubleshooting. Huawei's eOTDR（Embedded OTDR）is embedded in an OLT PON optical module. It works with the company's Line Assurance System iManager N2510 to effectively identify physical connections and optical fiber attenuation.

Huawei said its OTDR-embedded optical modules are the same size as standard optical modules and can be easily deployed on an FTTx network to assist with troubleshooting. This technique does not require serious network reconstruction, such as fiber connection modifications or optical network terminal (ONT) adjustment, nor does it interrupt services during the troubleshooting process.

China Telecom implemented Huawei's iManager N2510/eOTDR solution and completed testing across their entire live network. The test results demonstrated that this solution can locate all backbone fiber faults and the majority of branch fiber faults, work with a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) to demarcate faults and effectively reduce 40% O&M field engineer workload. Moreover, once ODN construction is completed, this solution can test fiber quality and maintain quality data, report alarms in the event of quality deterioration by implementing periodic testing and facilitate rapid response troubleshooting to reduce compliant and improve customer satisfaction. China Telecom has endorsed the test results.